Conceptualizing History of the Present Time

MUDROVCIC, MARÍA INÉS

Cambridge University Press

Lugar: Cambridge; Año: 2024 p. 97

978-1-009-46252-5

Abstract: In this work I distinguish four different meanings: 1) it indicates a temporal relationship of contemporaneity, 2) it names the nineteenth-century epochal experience of the present, 3) it designates the present for some historians of the twentieth century and 4) it designates a field of history. In what follows, I will attempt to develop the meanings of “contemporary” mentioned above with special emphasis on the fourth item: history of the present time as a historical field. I will argue that the disagreement about when does the present or the contemporary era begin are due historians assume a linear, chronological and absolute conception of time. Finally, and following L. Descombes, L. Hölscher, B. Latour, D. J. Wilcox and S. Tanaka, I will claim that if we conceive an historical time without chronology which was the very sense of “sharing the same time” that “contemporary” acquired for the first time, the majority of problems regarding the “beginnings” or the “meaning” of the present disappear. Emphasizing the relationships between activities and thinking in terms of relational time will help us in overcoming ontological problems like “so many presents” or “distance in time” as well as its epistemological problem of “objectivity” as its corresponding counterpart.